That awkward moment....

You know that awkward moment when you’ve been blogging for about two weeks, and you look at your phone to see that one of the most prestigious English literacy gurus has tweeted at you to tell you you’re wrong?

The first thing you do is turn your head and look at her books on your shelf that you’ve been using to guide your instruction – oh, and the curriculum development for the district – and then you completely freak out. And, yes, you start to question yourself.

But here’s the thing. In our last podcast, we took issue with Sara Holbrook’s assertion that the STAAR test should not be asking readers to infer author’s purpose from text structure or other literary elements. We argued, basically, that this was one of the key features of text analysis, that, in fact, it broadens and enriches the reader’s experience of the text, and that it helps readers become writers. You can listen to our full conversation here.

We knew there would be a response to this. What we didn’t expect was such a prestigious one! Stephanie Harvey – luminary educational consultant, writer of many respected books on education, (seriously buy her books, she’s awesome I’ve hyperlinked the ones we own here) - disagreed with us that evidence based inferencing is a way to gauge college readiness. On a larger scale she seems to support the position that you can think a piece of art is about whatever you want – but when the author tells you what it’s really about, then that’s the end of it. Georgia O’Keefe, it turns out, really was JUST painting flowers all this time.

But here’s the thing. This flies in the face of accepted critical literacy skills, as we know them at least. Webb’s Depths of Knowledge – the framework widely used by curriculum writers - explicitly references “determining the author’s purpose” as a strategic thinking skill. Stephanie, in your own book “Strategies that Work” you cite “reading like a writer” (i.e. inferring author’s intent for structural and literary technique use) as a, well, strategy that works. It is all over the state standards for Texas as a readiness standard, not to mention Common Core and College and Career Readiness Standards. And there is a reason for that. Determining author’s purpose is explicitly and repeatedly reconfirmed as an essential literacy skill.

You asked for our research backing up our claim that author’s purpose is a critical literacy skill. But what we ask you is, where is your research that is NOT? The state standards, common core, and college and career readiness standards all explicitly address this skill as necessary. These standards have been vetted. The STAAR exam itself has been independently validated to be accurately and reliably measuring these standards. These items are field tested, validated, and combined with multiple other readiness standards in order to get a general picture of the student. And to be considered ready they only have to get 50% correct.

The STAAR test itself is not all ALL author’s intent or craft, but those higher order thinking skills are a part of the test along with lower level testing  of vocabulary understanding, dictionary skills, summarizing, and paraphrasing. Would we prefer to see the higher order thinking skills assessed in a short answer rather than a more limiting multiple choice question? Sure. Unfortunately thanks in large part to complaints like these, the more authentic short answer response questions are now gone.

But since we criticize multiple choice assessments here – and since you asked for research, how about this one - Critical reading and multiple choice questions for author’s intent could increase students’ multiple-cause thinking - a key cognitive area of need according to Columbia University’s Kuhn and Holman. And this is the key point – using these assessments to drive instruction towards critical literacy and away from traditional reading comprehension is an equity issue in education. Traditional reading comprehension tests, which do not delve into analysis tools like author’s intent, are far too dependent on background knowledge. This gives an unfair advantage to wealthy students with their increased cultural capital and academic prep. This is part of what causes tests to skew along demographic lines.

And it is this inequity in education that, ultimately, all of us are here to solve. Our experience, as educators working under the TAKS framework – which skewed more towards the reading comprehension skill – and now under the STAAR framework bears witness to that bias. Critical literary analysis questions – even those as flawed as can appear in the STAAR – are the most equitable way to assess and identify students who are in NEED of intervention. Watch this space for a follow-up analysis of these same STAAR questions for an example.